Best Container Monitoring Tools
Container monitoring tools track container performance, collects event data, and measures the effects of container-sharing resources. Monitoring practices can be proactive, reactive, or adaptive. Proactive monitoring sets protocols to prevent container failure. Reactive monitoring alerts users by raising events when containers fail. Adaptive monitoring continually assesses container performance and impacts from new components. Companies use these tools to prevent large-scale failures and understand what caused individual events. They also help to optimize software-defined networks and resource allocation. In reality, container monitoring is essentially application performance monitoring (APM) software for container applications and their networks. They can exist independently or function alongside software types such as container management software and container networking software solutions.
To qualify for inclusion in the Container Monitoring category, a product must:
Best Container Monitoring Tools At A Glance
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- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
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Dynatrace is advancing observability for today’s digital businesses, helping to transform the complexity of modern digital ecosystems into powerful business assets. By leveraging AI-powered insights,
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Financial Services
- 69% Enterprise
- 23% Mid-Market
18,721 Twitter followers
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
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Datadog is the monitoring, security and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams, security engineers and business users in the cloud age. The SaaS platform integrates and automates infra
- Software Engineer
- DevOps Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 47% Mid-Market
- 35% Enterprise
50,036 Twitter followers
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
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Wiz transforms cloud security for customers – including more than 50% of the Fortune 100 – by enabling a new operating model. With Wiz, organizations can democratize security across the developme
- Security Engineer
- CISO
- Financial Services
- Computer Software
- 55% Enterprise
- 38% Mid-Market
17,406 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is an open source, enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform for building, deploying, and managing containerized applications across on-premise, private cloud and publi
- DevOps Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Financial Services
- 48% Enterprise
- 28% Mid-Market
295,491 Twitter followers
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
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Coralogix is a modern, full-stack observability platform transforming how businesses process and understand their data. Our unique architecture powers in-stream analytics without reliance on indexing
- Software Engineer
- DevOps Engineer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 53% Mid-Market
- 33% Enterprise
4,081 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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New Relic invented cloud APM for application engineers. Today it is a leader in observability and source of truth for all engineers to make decisions with data across their entire software stack and t
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 45% Mid-Market
- 29% Small-Business
67,692 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Insta
- Software Engineer
- System Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 43% Mid-Market
- 40% Enterprise
709,764 Twitter followers
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
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In today's digital landscape, businesses need a powerful and comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution to stay ahead of the curve. Introducing Rakuten SixthSense Observability -
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Games
- 48% Enterprise
- 37% Mid-Market
- Overview
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Checkmk is a comprehensive IT monitoring system that enables system administrators, IT managers, and DevOps teams to identify issues across their entire IT infrastructure (servers, applications, netwo
- IT Engineer
- Systemadministrator
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer & Network Security
- 42% Mid-Market
- 41% Enterprise
1,761 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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SolarWinds® Observability is a full-stack observability solution that addresses the needs of modern organizations of all sizes by providing deep visibility into their hybrid ecosystems while affording
- Network Engineer
- System Administrator
- Information Technology and Services
- Hospital & Health Care
- 46% Enterprise
- 37% Mid-Market
19,827 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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LogicMonitor® offers hybrid observability powered by AI. The company’s SaaS-based platform, LM Envision, enables observability across on-prem and multi-cloud environments. We provide IT and business t
- Infrastructure Manager
- Senior Systems Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 52% Mid-Market
- 30% Enterprise
12,641 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Singularity Cloud Security is SentinelOne’s comprehensive, cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). It combines the best of agentless insights with AI-powered threat protection, to secure
- Information Technology and Services
- Financial Services
- 60% Mid-Market
- 31% Enterprise
55,508 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Sysdig Monitor radically simplifies cloud and Kubernetes monitoring with deep visibility into container and Kubernetes workloads along with a managed Prometheus service. You get immediate, granular de
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 40% Mid-Market
- 38% Enterprise
10,126 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Grafana Labs provides an open and composable monitoring and observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. There are more than 3,000 Gra
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 46% Mid-Market
- 28% Small-Business
64,058 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Komodor enables enterprises to unlock the full potential of Kubernetes at scale. Our pioneering Kubernetes Management Platform eliminates complexity across the entire Kubernetes stack, to drive effici
- Computer & Network Security
- Financial Services
- 73% Mid-Market
- 14% Enterprise
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- User Satisfaction
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a cloud native application protection platform for multicloud and hybrid environments with comprehensive security across the full lifecycle, from development to runtime
- Saas Consultant
- Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 38% Mid-Market
- 34% Enterprise
14,002,464 Twitter followers
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An open-source service monitoring system and time series database.
- DevOps Engineer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 42% Mid-Market
- 34% Small-Business
52,054 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Netdata is a real-time, high-performance, and on-premises observability platform designed to monitor metrics and logs with unparalleled efficiency. It requires zero-configuration to get started and pr
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 49% Small-Business
- 43% Mid-Market
4,082 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Dash0 is the only OpenTelemetry Native observability platform built with developers in mind. With granular, resource-centric monitoring, Dash0 provides real-time visibility across your applications an
- Computer Software
- 63% Small-Business
- 21% Mid-Market
1,986 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Powered by Cisco, AppDynamics is on a mission to help companies see their technology through the lens of the business so they can work as one to prioritize what matters most. We’re reinventing the obs
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 58% Enterprise
- 35% Mid-Market
728,816 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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SUSE Observability gives you full-stack visibility into your modern IT landscape Kubernetes, cloud, VMs, infrastructure, applications all connected in one unified view. Built on open standards like Op
- Information Technology and Services
- Banking
- 71% Enterprise
- 25% Mid-Market
63,134 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Sumo Logic, Inc. unifies and analyzes enterprise data, translating it into actionable insights through one AI-powered cloud-native log analytics platform. This single source of truth enables Dev, Sec
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 49% Mid-Market
- 40% Enterprise
6,569 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by customers to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamicall
- Systems Engineer
- System Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 45% Enterprise
- 31% Mid-Market
709,764 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
SquaredUp is a unified observability portal. Say goodbye to blind spots and data silos. Using data mesh and cutting-edge data visualization, SquaredUp gives IT and engineering teams one place to see
- 64% Enterprise
- 29% Mid-Market
1,185 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Atatus is a full-stack observability platform developed for optimizing the performance and reliability of software applications. Our platform seamlessly integrates monitoring, security, and analytics,
- CEO
- CTO
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 76% Small-Business
- 20% Mid-Market
95 Twitter followers
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- Seller Details
Chronosphere is the only observability platform that puts you back in control by taming rampant data growth and cloud-native complexity, delivering increased business confidence. Chronosphere is an e
- Financial Services
- 65% Enterprise
- 25% Mid-Market
1,332 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Honeycomb is the observability platform that enables engineering teams to find and solve problems they couldn't before. Honeycomb’s approach is fundamentally different from other tools that claim obse
- 53% Mid-Market
- 33% Enterprise
14,853 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Introducing FusionReactor Observability with OpsPilot GenAI and OpenTelemetry Integration – the ultimate solution for comprehensive application monitoring and analysis. With this powerful combination
- CTO
- Developer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 61% Small-Business
- 29% Mid-Market
9,496 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Sematext Cloud is an innovative, unified platform with all-in-one solutions for infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, real user monitoring, and synthetic monit
- Information Technology and Services
- 47% Mid-Market
- 45% Small-Business
3,817 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
SignalFx is the only real-time cloud monitoring platform for infrastructure, microservices, and applications. The platform discovers and collects metrics across every component in your cloud environme
- Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 35% Enterprise
- 33% Mid-Market
728,816 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Company The German company Icinga GmbH is an open-source manufacturer for infrastructure monitoring. Its customers include global enterprises, many government institutions, and numerous mid-sized com
- Information Technology and Services
- 55% Enterprise
- 36% Mid-Market
5,176 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Centreon is a comprehensive IT monitoring solution designed to help organizations gain full visibility and control over their IT operations. By providing real-time insights into system performance, ne
- Network Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Internet
- 72% Mid-Market
- 22% Enterprise
712 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Apica offers a unified perspective on the entire technology stack, encompassing logs, metrics, traces, and APIs. This operational data fabric facilitates quick identification and resolution of perform
- 47% Mid-Market
- 33% Enterprise
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
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Middleware is a full-stack observability platform that brings all metrics, logs, and traces in one unified timeline to debug issues faster. It helps you un-silo your data and insights from all your co
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 74% Small-Business
- 18% Enterprise
- Overview
- Pros and Cons
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Set Up AWS Infrastructure Monitoring Instantly. For dev-focused teams with little dedicated ops, getting AWS Cloud monitoring set up for the first time is manual and cumbersome; it requires significan
- 60% Mid-Market
- 40% Small-Business
193 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Humio changes the way enterprises relate and interact with their data by making it fast, easy, and cost-effective to log anything and answer anything at scale, in real-time. Humio enables DevOps, ITOp
- 47% Enterprise
- 47% Mid-Market
107,168 Twitter followers
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- Seller Details
OverOps root cause analysis at runtime instantly pinpoints why critical issues break backend Java and .NET environments in pre-prod through production. Detective-work such as searching logs is not req
- Computer Software
- 67% Small-Business
- 25% Mid-Market
7 Twitter followers
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- Seller Details
Lightstep’s observability platform is the easiest way for developers and SREs to monitor health and respond to changes in cloud-native applications. Powered by cutting-edge distributed tracing and a g
- Computer Software
- 45% Enterprise
- 35% Mid-Market
51,662 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Virtana delivers the industry's deepest hybrid infrastructure observability platform, empowering enterprises to ensure the availability, efficiency, and resiliency of their mission-critical services.
- 38% Small-Business
- 38% Enterprise
9,598 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
ATSD is a distributed NoSQL database designed from the ground up to store and analyze time-series data at scale. Unlike most other databases, ATSD comes with a robust set of built-in features includin
- 50% Mid-Market
- 25% Enterprise
55 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Kubestone is a benchmarking Operator that can evaluate the performance of Kubernetes installations.
- 100% Mid-Market
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Motadata AIOps is a purpose-built platform for enterprises to enable their I&O teams to change how they approach data management and data processing that shapes business decisions. By leveraging o
- 56% Mid-Market
- 24% Small-Business
162 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Micro Focus is now part of OpenText! OpenText™ Operations Bridge (OpsBridge) automatically monitors and analyzes the health and performance of Hybrid IT resources across any device, operating system,
- Information Technology and Services
- Retail
- 106% Enterprise
- 3% Mid-Market
21,716 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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A robust incident communication platform that provides your users with transparent, real-time updates. It also supports more than 50 languages and seamlessly integrates with monitoring tools, making i
- 80% Mid-Market
- 20% Enterprise
103,834 Twitter followers
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- Seller Details
Altinity® is the leading service and software provider for ClickHouse – an open-source column-store analytic DBMS – the cutting-edge technology for managing and analyzing extremely large volumes of da
- 100% Small-Business
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Kiali is an observability console for Istio with service mesh configuration capabilities. It helps you to understand the structure of your service mesh by inferring the topology, and also provides the
- 100% Mid-Market
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Northflank is a unified developer platform for building, deploying, and managing applications on your choice of infrastructure. Streamline your entire post-commit pipeline with a comprehensive suite o
- Computer Software
- 91% Small-Business
- 9% Mid-Market
1,005 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Riemann aggregates events from your servers and applications with a powerful stream processing language. Riemann provides low-latency, transient shared state for systems with many moving parts.
- 100% Mid-Market
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
- 50% Enterprise
- 50% Mid-Market
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
RTVIEW 360-degree APM PLATFORM is an application performance management software that provides real-time, single-pane-of-glass visibility into numerous and varied business applications including custo
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
We are working with Bay area-based startups helping them build container orchestration/networking/storage/security products. And on another hand we work with enterprises helping Automotive, FinTech, E
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Cobe provides Service-Centric Intelligence into business applications running in a Microservices (Kubernetes) environment; with a cloud-hosted SaaS platform that identifies anomalies, pinpoints impact
45 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
CoScale provides full-stack container monitoring, optimized for production environments. The CoScale platform continuously monitors your entire container environment, as well as the impact on user exp
606 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Powerful monitoring at any scale Understand your data at a glance with our simple, flexible, and affordable monitoring platform.
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Jetstack helps businesses to build and operate modern cloud native infrastructure with Kubernetes.
- 100% Mid-Market
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
4-in-1 SaaS monitoring for Kubernetes: User, Service, Application (APM), and Infra (Kubernetes) all in one. You can gain full observability with just one-line command.
- Overview
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- Seller Details
Kubeturbo leverages Turbonomic's patented analysis engine to provide visibility and control across the entire stack in order to assure the performance of running micro-services in Kubernetes Pods, as
709,764 Twitter followers
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- Seller Details
Meros is a startup focusing on advanced tools for DevOps the tools and practices for creating and managing todays large applications.
59 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
MidoNet is an Apache licensed production grade network virtualization software for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
268 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Netsil provides observability and monitoring for modern cloud apps. DevOps teams use Netsil's auto-discovered maps & analytics to assure uptime and performance.
- Overview
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- Seller Details
:whale: NexClipper is an AI based Cloud native application monitoring and operation automation solution to migrate and operate cloud platform with monitoring, automation, and failure predictions.
107 Twitter followers
- Overview
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Sedai delivers AI-powered cloud cost optimization and performance tuning, empowering DevOps and SRE teams to maximize cloud savings, improve customer experience, and seamlessly scale. With Sedai, comp
- 50% Mid-Market
- 50% Small-Business
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
ServicePilot ISM is a solution for monitoring the availability and performance of converged infrastructures. ServicePilot ISM collects key indicators and offers all the functions required for incident
40 Twitter followers
Learn More About Container Monitoring Tools
What are Container Monitoring Tools?
Container monitoring tools monitor running containers, collect container activity logs, and analyze the data to provide observability and insights into container performance.
Containers are ephemeral. It means that they are deleted once their work is complete. So it becomes necessary to continuously collect data and move it to a centralized location to ensure the data is not lost. Container monitoring solutions provide visibility and real-time insights into these highly dynamic containers.
Container monitoring is not very straightforward. Container environments have multiple elements—container hosts, container engines, cluster management systems, and microservices. Failure of any of these elements can affect container performance. This inflates the number of components that container monitoring tools must track. In addition, several layers of abstraction between containers and hardware ensure they can run anywhere. While this is one of the most significant advantages containers offer, monitoring is much more difficult. Containers share resources, which makes monitoring them more tricky. Container monitoring systems can come to the rescue here as they help observe and keep track of the highly elusive containers. Container monitoring systems generally capture metrics such as CPU usage, cache memory usage, network traffic, and time-series data. The information thus collected is compared with preset thresholds to identify anomalies and alert the concerned teams. Most container monitoring tools also provide visualizations and dashboards to enable users to get insights about container health and performance easily.
What Types of Container Monitoring Tools Exist?
The following are the different types of container monitoring tools that exist.
Open-source container monitoring solutions
Open-source container monitoring products often have a lower price point than proprietary software and may even be free. These options may be better for smaller businesses that do not need expansive, feature-rich products. One important point to note is that most open-source products have little or no support staff behind them. So buyers should ensure they have a good in-house development team when implementing one.
Proprietary container monitoring solutions
Proprietary container monitoring software offers more powerful features and performance than open-source software. It also has a more robust support structure for implementation and maintenance. However, it can be expensive. Moreover, some features might be part of the proprietary software package, which is irrelevant to the buyer’s business. This can unnecessarily add up costs.
What are the Common Features of Container Monitoring Tools?
The following are some core features within container monitoring tools that can help users:
Dashboards and visualizations: Container monitoring is complex. Dashboards and data visualizations present information in a highly digestible format for easy sharing, monitoring, and analysis. It can also provide insights at multiple levels of granularity, which helps the user drill down to the exact pods, containers, and clusters to identify the root cause of the issues.
Architecture display: Container monitoring tools create a graphical representation of services, integrations, and IT infrastructure associated with a container ecosystem. This allows users quick access and the ability to browse information easily.
Anomaly detection: Anomaly detection features let users automate systems to constantly monitor user behavior activity and compare it to benchmarked patterns.
Performance baseline: Baselines and benchmarks are used to set a standard performance level against which the user can compare live applications and infrastructure activities.
Real-time monitoring: Real-time monitoring automates constant monitoring processes for applications and IT infrastructure to detect anomalies in real time.
Alerting: Alerting features notify relevant stakeholders via modes, such as emails and messages, when the performance goes below predefined thresholds.
API monitoring: API monitoring traces connections between different containerized environments and detects anomalies in functionality, user accessibility, traffic flows, and tampering.
Configuration monitoring: This feature allows users to monitor configuration rule sets, enforce policy measures, and document changes to maintain compliance.
Improvement suggestions: When issues are identified, this functionality provides the user with suggestions for improvement, giving information about potential remedies or improvements to prevent slowdowns, errors, or failures.
Automation: Automation features help scale the usage of resources. Automation also monitors operations to optimize visibility and responds in real time based on fluctuations in usage.
What are the Benefits of Container Monitoring Tools?
These are some of the benefits that container monitoring platforms provide:
Faster, proactive issue resolution: Container monitoring tools work by collecting application metrics and dependencies. The tools use this information to set a baseline for performance metrics and help identify abnormalities. As issues arise, container monitoring solutions alert administrative staff and allow for real-time observation of application and infrastructure performance.
Detailed visuals: This helps the user quickly drill down to the root causes of issues presented and improves the team’s ability to quickly fix them, minimizing the impact on end-users and customers.
Improved performance: One of the most important benefits of container monitoring tools is their ability to improve application performance. The tools provide a window into resource usage, redundancies, and inefficiencies. This helps companies evaluate their resources and apps and fine-tune them to achieve the best performance.
Safety net for change implementation: Any changes that the development teams deploy are constantly monitored. The tools immediately detect and notify the developers of any issues or vulnerabilities, allowing teams to take quick actions to remediate the problems.
Who Uses Container Monitoring Tools?
The following personnel most commonly use container monitoring software.
IT administrators: IT administrators use container monitoring software to monitor their container applications and ensure overall system health and performance. The software helps IT administrators detect issues, troubleshoot, balance system workloads, allocate resources efficiently, and improve the performance of running containers.
Developers: Developers use container monitoring software to keep a pulse on their apps and ensure a consistent, quality user experience. This tool allows developers to compare performance metrics against desired benchmarks and effectively begin remediation when performance issues arise.
What are the Alternatives to Container Monitoring Tools?
Alternatives to container monitoring software that can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools: Application performance monitoring solutions help users track and visualize application obstructions and help troubleshoot any future predictable issues. They also facilitate real-time insights through dashboards into application performance and trigger timely alerts for issues like a disturbance in load or response times.
Cloud infrastructure monitoring software: Cloud infrastructure monitoring software allows companies to visualize and track the performance of their cloud-native applications or services. These tools aggregate real-time data to display information related to a company’s cloud-based resources. These tools can track application performance, network availability, and resource allocation, among other cloud-related factors.
Software Related to Container Monitoring Tools
Related solutions that can be used together with container monitoring tools include:
Container management software: Container management software adds a level of abstraction to the container engine’s instance. It simplifies administrative processes to automate container creation, deployment, and scaling processes, saving companies time and money.
Container orchestration software: Container orchestration software plays a significant role in the overall container lifecycle. These tools interact with the apps running inside their respective containers. They maintain the container’s performance and allow developers to implement updates or rollbacks quickly. Container orchestration software is typically used by companies that maintain many containers. They make it easier to manage system configurations. Many of these solutions come bundled with container management tools to simplify integration, and several options exist for the user.
Container networking software: Some containers rely on other containers for data; others only hold an application's components. All containers rely on network accessibility for proper functionality. Container networking software helps users define networks and connect containers across multiple hosts. Efficiently networked containers create a decentralized architecture where parts of an application can be added or removed without affecting availability. These tools make it easier to scale apps, manage configurations, and secure application networks.
Container security software: Container security software often provides several monitoring capabilities. However, these monitoring functions differ as they are specifically designed for security rather than performance. Also, monitoring will not be the product’s core functionality. These tools facilitate various security functions, from access control and user provisioning to vulnerability assessment and advanced threat protection.
Challenges with Container Monitoring Tools
Container monitoring solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Scalability: Some tools are designed to monitor single applications. Others might be capable of performing real-time monitoring on multiple globally distributed applications. This should be a key consideration for adoption. There are various monitoring tools specialized for small businesses or enterprise companies. Depending on the size and scope of a company’s application portfolio, some monitoring tools might be better than others for a specific company’s needs.
Infrastructure access: Infrastructure accessibility can be essential in diagnosing and troubleshooting issues with containerized applications. On-premises servers are easier to access but often require constant attention and have a considerable up-front cost. Cloud services, used mainly by DevOps teams, may require a high level of customizability to suit a company’s needs. This might impact a company’s direct access to logs and incident details.
How to Buy Container Monitoring Tools
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Container Monitoring Tools
Some important things to consider while buying a container monitoring software are the number of metrics it provides and if they are the most relevant ones for the buyer. The tool must also provide easy log management as well as alerting and visualization capabilities, with machine learning capabilities an added advantage. Many vendors also offer solutions with a large bouquet of features. Buyers must carefully evaluate the relevance of those features to their requirements before splurging more money into proprietary software.
Compare Container Monitoring Software Products
Create a long list
Buyers need to identify features that they need from their container monitoring tools and start with a large pool of container monitoring software vendors. Buyers must then evaluate the pros and cons of each product.
Create a short list
Short lists help cross-reference the results of initial vendor evaluations with other buyer reviews on third-party review sites such as g2.com, which will help the buyer narrow in on a three to five product list. From there, buyers can compare pricing and features to determine the best fit.
Conduct demos
Companies should demo all of the products on their short list. During demos, buyers should ask specific questions about the functionalities they care about most; for example, one might ask for a demo of how the tool would behave when it detects a particular performance issue.
Selection of Container Monitoring Tools
Choose a selection team
Regardless of a company’s size, involving the most relevant personnel is crucial during the container monitoring software selection process. The team should include relevant company stakeholders who can use the software, scrutinize it, and check whether it will meet the organization’s requirements. The individuals responsible for the day-to-day use of container monitoring tools must be a part of the selection team. IT administrators, developers, and decision makers could be the primary personas included in the group.
Negotiation
The cost of the monitoring software varies based on the features offered, the number of nodes, and users. Buyers looking to trim costs should try to negotiate down to the specific functions that matter to them to get the best price. More often than not, the price and specifications mentioned on the vendor’s pricing page can be negotiated. Vendors may be willing to offer discounts or an extra number of licenses for multi-year contracts. Negotiation on implementation, support, and other professional services are also crucial. Buyers should ensure they’ll receive adequate support to get the product up and running.
Final decision
Before deciding to purchase the software, testing it for a short period is advisable. The day-to-day users of the software are the best individuals to perform this test. They can use and analyze the software product's capabilities and offer valuable feedback.
In most cases, software service providers offer a short-term product trial. If the selection team is satisfied with what the software offers, buyers can proceed with the purchase or contracting process.
How much do Container Monitoring Tools cost?
The cost of container monitoring software typically depends on the number and features required. Some even offer free trial periods to start with.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Companies must evaluate the savings and optimization that the container monitoring software provides. This can help companies compare costs vs. quality and performance that the container monitoring platform helps achieve.
Container Monitoring Tools Trends
Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with container monitoring tools: AI- and ML-based analytics can enable predictive maintenance of containers leading to much better performance, availability, and user experience. Given the complexity of technical environments where failure at one place can lead to cascading failures, this capability can greatly prevent outages and downtimes.
DevOps: DevOps has become an established application development and deployment methodology. Its emphasis on continuous integration makes it easy for companies to test new functionality or update applications quickly. Containerization technology is often a vital component of these systems. Companies use containers because they can provide built-in code and application components to new or existing containerized applications.
